The Seizure of the Beast

Iulia Militaru is a writer and editor of frACTalia Press, as well as a member of the collectives Literature and Feminism and Workshop X. She has authored: Marea pipeadă (The Great Pipe Epic, 2010), dramadoll (co-authored with Anca Bucur and Cristina Florentina Budar in 2012), Confiscarea bestiei (o postcercetare) (The Seizure of the Beast. A Post-research, 2016), and Atlas (auto)mat/on (auto)BIO/graphy/I© de câteva tipuri principale de discursuri (Atlas (auto)mat/on (auto)BIO/graphy/I© of several main types of speeches, e-book in 2017; second edition in print, 2019). She published poems digital collages in several international journals, as well as a theoretic study, Metaforic şi metonimic: o tipologie a poeziei (Metaphorical and Metonymical: a Typology of Poetry, 2011). Interested in the New Materialism and the Queer Theory, in 2018 she started working on the project Maia Şerbănescu to imagine new forms of material existence, alternative sexualities, and corporeal transformations when immersed in different environments. Maia Şerbănescu is a hybrid xeno-entity fascinated by ero guro nansensu and gurlesque poetry, and the author of collections Fuck off, Mr. Charcot! (2019) și OikosLogia. Știința casei socialiste și a ființelor posibile (OikosLogia. The Science of the Socialist House and of the Possible Beings, 2022). In 2020, she published the first volume of her research, Literatura și fenomenul alienării (Literature and the Phenomenon of Alienation), a thorough study on the way the concept of alienation was produced in the 19th century in Romania and on the realities generated by its network of significations.

Claudia Serea is a Romanian-American poet, translator, and editor. Her poems and translations are published in Field, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, The Malahat Review, The Puritan, Oxford Poetry, among others. Serea won a Pushcart Prize, the Joanne Scott Kennedy Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of Virginia, and the New Letters Readers Award for her poems. Her poems have been translated in Russian, French, Italian, Arabic, and Farsi, and have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac. She is the author of seven poetry collections and four chapbooks, most recently In Those Years, No One Slept (Broadstone Books, 2023) and Writing on the Walls at Night (Unsolicited Press, 2022). Her collection of poems translated into Arabic, Tonight I’ll Become a Lake into which You’ll Sink, was published in Cairo, Egypt, in 2021. Serea is a founding editor of National Translation Month, and she co-edited and co-translated The Vanishing Point That Whistles, an Anthology of Contemporary Romanian Poetry (Talisman House Publishing, 2011). She also translated from Romanian Adina Dabija’s Beautybeast (Northshore Press, 2012). Claudia Serea serves on the board of The Red Wheelbarrow Poets and is one of the curators of the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Readings. She writes, translates, and edits manuscripts in Rutherford, New Jersey.